


Uncurl

by meanderingsoul



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Celibacy, Desire, Emotional Hurt, Exhaustion, F/M, Grooming, Masturbation, Past Relationship(s), Rituals, Season/Series 05, Self Care, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 13:11:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14356197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanderingsoul/pseuds/meanderingsoul
Summary: Melinda laid down on her back in her shirt and bare legs and uncurled her fists again.





	Uncurl

 

May only didn’t slam her door behind her because she’d want to do it about seventeen more times after that and it would make too much noise.

Too much noise for other people. Coulson goddamn knew better than to come after her right now.

She didn’t need to punch things now. She didn't. It was very likely that kind of energy would have somewhere else to go soon. If she used it up on a heavy bag she wouldn’t have as much when she needed it later. Better to save it.

Deep breaths. Uncurl fingers before the nails cut your palms.

Fury’d had a particular spirituality about bodies and the work people like theirs did in particular. A way of thinking, harsh and grounded. The academy had lost something when he didn’t have time to teach anymore.

_It’s a tool. Someone else might be calling shots, but this meat works under your control. A car you can turn the key and it knows it’s not working. A body that’s a tool needs to know when its not working. You’ve got to show it so it understands._

Everyone picked up their own rituals. Nat would get a massage. Garret had his whole shave and a haircut thing. Barton slept like it was a marathon, fuzzy blankets and cartoon sheets. Phil took a bath.

She’d always done the same thing when she could. Shower. Conditioner. Trim the ends of her hair. Lotion that didn’t smell like hospital. Clean and file her nails smooth. Paint them black or white, sometimes even navy or indigo.

These were old habits, old training. Hypervigilance hadn’t really been much of a word yet, but it’d still helped when it came around. She slept easier when she got to do her routine after a mission.

Melinda had no stability left. Her body was a wreck. Like everything else.

Deep breaths. Uncurl your fingers.

He hadn’t believed her before. She still wanted to go _wipe that look off his face_. He hadn’t _believed_ her.

She’d _told_ him, told him in the ruins of the base they’d rebuilt. That it hadn’t been programming, that she thought they should try this too, that things were different with them now.

He’d always listened. He knew how to listen to her, heard what she wasn’t saying even when no one else did. That was them.

Phil wasn’t listening.

Melinda could count on fingers the times he’d ever made her shout over him.

She didn’t believe the universe was this kind of petty, but it still stung having her face rubbed in just how much being locked out like that _hurt_ when she'd done it to so many people in the past.

She’d always respected and admired his relentlessness. Always. As an agent, as a man, as someone she sometimes took orders from whether she knew the whole picture of why or not. She’d thought that inability to give up, to roll over and show belly was in his bones, but maybe the Rider had burned through it.

No. No. Peace with it was just what he kept saying. It wasn’t the truth. He wouldn’t tell her the…

Deep breath and uncurl fingers.

Melinda wanted a shower, a _real_ one, but she wasn’t really off duty and there wasn’t any conditioner or nail polish in this whole wretched tin can.

Deep breaths.

She unlaced her boots one by one, folded her jeans over a chair.

Her skin was too pale. Her leg looked bad, the pink scar tissue still thin and raw, oversensitive.

She laid down on her back on the thin mattress in her shirt and bare legs and uncurled her fingers.

Melinda ended up staring down at the blank front of her panties.

It wasn’t something she’d planned or decided, but she’d been completely celibate over two years now.

And it wasn’t just that she hadn’t had sex. She hadn’t touched herself. Hadn’t even wanted to as anything more than a fleeting twinge.

It'd been a choice after Ward, to set that aside. It was too much to live with, wondering if she'd missed some sign because for a while they were...

This time she'd just... stopped.

Two years. It was the kind of dry spell that made you wonder if it still even _fucking worked_.

It still wasn’t desire that made her yank the panties down her legs, it was _anger_ , making her muscles flush with blood and shiver, her heart speed beneath her breast.

She sucked two fingers warm and wet and slicked them over her folds. It just felt like skin, soft and blood-warm. She wasn’t flushed. Wasn’t wet. Wasn’t particularly interested.

Figured.

She cupped her palm warm around her mound and let her fingers play mindlessly.

Melinda had never been much into fantasizing about stuff when she touched herself.

It was old habit to not allow herself to think about Andrew. Those first years it’d simply hurt too much. Now it always turned to blue skin in her head eventually, just another thing Lash had stolen.

It’d been decades since Coulson was someone she thought of sexually as more than a blip. She remembered being young and disappointed that she hadn’t got to try him out on that mission, when it would have been so much easier for them to fuck and ignore it later and she'd known he’d be far too smart to get expectations about it. When he’d been a good friend with the duck-fluff hair and big blue eyes and cute ass, when they’d had so much less history.

When Mace was new and Daisy was lost and Coulson was gone all the time and she’d started to _yearn_ for his company, it’d been chaste. She’d wanted to be held and sleep in his bed and drink together late at night and that fucking communications bastard couldn’t even stop lying to her face enough to let her get a _sentence_ out.

Her hands on her body were another way to live in it, another way to convince it that it wasn’t working right now, that it wasn’t a tool for now, that it was for her and only needed to exist.

But she didn’t even want to be in her body and it only made her angrier, which only made her blood run hotter despite it all.

She felt tight pressing inside, clinging around her fingers and it finally sent a throb up through her belly, made her breath shudder on the way out and her mouth drop open.

Oh.

She’d forgotten how this felt.

It was habit, instinct to curl her fingers just so, to grind her knuckles hard against her flesh before she pressed inwards. She was slick deeper inside herself. It was a kind of relief.

This wasn’t the way she wanted her body. The fuzz between her legs was all wrong for how she liked it. She’d barely been able to sleep for days. It’d been weeks since she’d had food that’d been living sometime this century and _weeks again_ before that. Her muscles were off her peak and her flexibility was shot because of the damn leg. Her hair was ragged at the ends and her skin was dry and she was still more angry than turned on but if she couldn’t manage to make herself come that might just be the last straw.

It ached to pull her fingers free of herself when it was just almost feeling right, but she needed to slide them slickly along either side of her clit to wake it up, to finally feel that flare of heat.

She could smell herself, her body’s arousal, a trace of sweat, finally no trace of blood.

Melinda rolled over up onto her knees, elbow braced under her to force her fingers deeper, grinding against the heel of her hand, her face hidden against her other arm on the narrow bed.

This wasn’t the way she wanted this. She didn’t want her own skin under her open mouth. She wanted a _man_. She wanted the warm smell of him and heavy arms, broad muscle under her fingers and fuzz under her cheek. There should be breathing here that wasn’t hers and flanks that would shudder under her nails and a cock inside her because her fingers were _little_ damnit and she was remembering somehow right now just how much she liked to _fuck_.

This wasn’t the way she wanted goddamned _anything_.

She wanted his freckles and long fingers and the way he set his cheek against her hair and if Phil was in the same room as her right now she’d either hit him or cry.

Orgasm rattled through her nerves quick and harsh and exhausting the way it always was after a long time and she fell heavily onto her side. She wanted to scream, but she wasn’t lost in it enough and she’d never really done that anyway.

She curled in a ball with her sweaty shirt rucked under her breasts, slick fingers and tacky thighs and an angry shiver still in her muscles.

Melinda pretended her wet eyes were because of her first orgasm in years and not because of anything else.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 5x17. That was a better love confession that I had ever imagined. The sheer force of May's frustration could reconstruct the Earth. But I am not expecting any fluff any time soon and I sure didn't write any.
> 
> I am 2/2 at writing May wanting good sex and 0/3 at actually finishing the new fics where she gets any good sex. Throw things at me. 
> 
> Also, this is my 50th work on ao3! Yay! I am perfectly happy with it being over a thousand words of May having sexy and angry thoughts.
> 
> Thank you all for reading <3


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